WEIRD MUSIC IS NOT SO WELCOMED: IN CONVERSATION WITH NARRATIVA
CONVERSATION BY YANGRUNG CHEN (MOCO)
CO-FOUNDER, ART DIRECTOR
15 SEPTEMBER 2026 — MADRID, SPAIN
Every artist eventually has to decide what to do with their contradictions; this one turned his into a character. Somewhere between Santiago and Madrid, between hip-hop's earnestness and techno's cold detachment, between the "clean cinematic look" he actively avoids and the pixelated, glitched-out visuals he actively pursues, a Chilean musician built a persona blond, distorted, and impossible to pin down and called it El Rusio. It's a joke. It's also completely sincere. That tension is the whole point. Under the banner of his ongoing project NARRATIVA, he treats titles like punchlines, football footage like found art, and his own face like raw material to be sampled, sorted, and reassembled. What emerges is less a genre than a worldview: unbothered by scenes that won't have him, unwilling to sand down the weirdness for anyone's comfort, and convinced, against a fair amount of evidence, that the whole thing is still worth doing.
You moved from Chile to Madrid to pursue your career seriously. Your album is called ¡El Rusio!, "the blond one," and that same blond-wigged figure with a distorted, stylized face keeps showing up across your visuals, floating over Santiago, standing in for you on covers. Is El Rusio a character you're performing, or is it closer to how you actually see yourself since leaving Chile?
Madrid's been a strange place for me, honestly. Everyone here is trying to be Latin, you know. They assume we all play salsa or we love football, but there's a deep unknown iceberg in arts and culture. When I arrived in Madrid, I had the expectations of a better life and to pursue my music here, and from my experience, it's been very hard. Weird music here is not so welcomed (laughs), and being an immigrant here is very hard when you don't have papers or any contacts. The real deal was to release ¡El Rusio! before arriving in Madrid, as a cover letter to present my project to everyone, because for me, ¡El Rusio! is like a cartoonish version of me. Sort of like if I were to appear in a special Smiling Friends episode. If we talk about rap music, there's a lot of acts trying to be serious or trying to be tough. They all put a mask to be themselves, and I think every artist does that. For me, it's just an exaggeration of myself. A very honest one, with nothing to hide.
Your caption for the album says it "hasn't had the impact it deserves" and ends with "¡Todos somos Rusios!", everyone is a Rusio. What does that phrase mean to you, and who is it actually addressed to: your listeners, other Chilean artists in Madrid, or something more general?
¡Rusio! comes from a chilean slang they say with blonde people, like the cover of my album. ¡Todos somos Rusios! It's a shoutout to everyone that's weird and has been marginalized for being different. If you are genuinely weird and still searching for yourself, congratulations, you are a ¡Rusio!
Your posts point to a separate fan account called @invisible.narrativa, and there's a recurring interest in obscuring identity: a blond-wigged figure with a distorted, stylized face, a heavily pixelated self-portrait. What's the appeal of staying partially hidden inside a project that's still very clearly about you?
That account was made by a fan (shoutout to my man Matías!). He got to me via TikTok and told me he wanted to make a fan account. I said yes, of course. He wanted to help me by doing a fan account, updating with news and snippets. It was very surprising, and I will always be grateful for anyone who supports me in that way. It really makes me pursue my music career more.
¡RUSIO! MENU
"For me, it's just an exaggeration of myself. A very honest one, with nothing to hide."
¡RUSIO! TRACKLIST
You call yourself an experimental hip-hop artist, but you've also made techno and straight electronic work. Is that range a genre decision, or do you just follow whatever a track needs and worry about the label afterward?
My past releases were a lot more like experiments to search for my sound more than an all around project. I started at a young age in Hip Hop culture, then I started listening to electronica, then I did some techno and IDM, and finally began releasing under my most recent project NARRATIVA, which is everything I have learned since I'm alive. For me, labels don't matter so much. I really focus on my live performance and my artist persona, creating a vast digital universe, which can represent my sound.
A lot of your titles read like jokes before you've heard a second of the song: Pepe Pollo, ¡Feliz Cum!, the katakana-and-symbol one. How much of NARRATIVA is meant to be funny, and does that humor ever get in the way of people taking the actual music seriously?
Just to annoy people. I just focus on the music. Titles don't mean nothing. If you want to learn, read a book or an essay, there's plenty. Music can make you think but not necessarily make you learn. My approach to music has always been serious in the process, but too much seriousness, I think, can turn your art corny or pretentious. I like the middleground. I have songs that can make you cry or songs that can make you laugh. I love doing that, it's part of life.
Your sound and your visuals both lean hard into a scavenged, degraded aesthetic: pixel sorting, deep-web-style glitch, low-res football footage, Google Earth flyovers used as backdrops instead of a studio or a set. Where does that texture come from for you?
It's all about resources. When you are pretty tight up with money, you need to improvise. I don't have money to pay for a studio with a full production team. I would love to, but you know, times change. Creativity flies better with less resources, it makes you think in a more deep way, and surprises can happen, you never know.
¡RAP! Music Video
"Creativity flies better with less resources, it makes you think in a more deep way, and surprises can happen, you never know."
¡RUSIO! STAGE SELECTION
AMORE 4
Old football broadcast footage, a header challenge, a goal-mouth clip, a Coca-Cola-branded broadcast, shows up as source material the same way found footage might for a video artist. What's the connection for you between football fandom and the world you're building musically?
Nothing much, to be honest. I just love to collect certain historic moments from my country. It can be football, historic videos, memes, social media, television and any digital media. For example, the visuals that I made on my single "Fran Revolver" were deeply inspired by Pro Evolution Soccer 6, an old game which many kids grew up playing. I even sampled the main theme. I love it.
Left: NARRATIVA
Right: Cチ Hリ Iの Lシ E テAィNポMッUプ Artwork
Does having a formal editing background make it harder to lean into the glitch and degradation in your own work, because you know exactly how to make something look "clean" and are choosing not to, or does it feel unrelated to that instinct entirely?
Definitely. My music makes me think a lot about the video editing and overall visual concept. I'm always learning new stuff and tutorials to integrate in a better way. Now I try to avoid the "clean cinematic look" and use other resources. I currently record a lot on iPhone, 60 fps and very little color correction, to make more of that real and visceral look. I think there's a lot to learn about 3D, Blender and Touchdesigner. It's all about being digital in this semi digital world, approaching new technologies.
You've been in Madrid, still building an audience for alternative and "música que arriesga", music that takes risks. What does success actually look like for NARRATIVA at this stage: a bigger local following in Spain, getting picked up back in Chile, or something else you haven't said out loud yet?
That's a deep question. I came to search for a strong scene and to connect with people with similar tastes, and to be honest, I had a lot of expectations in Spain. Unfortunately, here in Madrid there's no interesting scene or any interesting weird music. People here tend to copy what's already famous. They all wanna be Bb Trickz or Rusowsky, which is fine, but there's no interesting scene whatsoever. There's nothing here to make me stay in Spain, to be honest, and with my current situation in terms of visa papers… I decided to come back to my home country. It made me realize that there is a very strong and beautiful music scene in Chile... Collectives like Muestra, Sello Medio Oriente, and Winterbreak have a lot of great artists trying to push boundaries forward. Some of them are even doing gigs outside in Europe and the U.S.! So you know, it makes me believe and not lose hope, because in the end, it's all about not looking at other people's careers but your own, because you don't know their story or background. I've been doing this for at least thirteen years, and I have never earned significant money to pay for anything with my music. I have never had opportunities that can change my life, but I will always make music. Why? Because I love it, and nobody can change what I feel, not my family, people, friends, or anyone.
Cチ Hリ Iの Lシ E テAィNポMッUプ！UI
"If you are genuinely weird and still searching for yourself, congratulations, you are a ¡Rusio!"
MUY HU! VISUALIZER
You've credited a rotating cast on mixing, mastering, and production. Is NARRATIVA a solo project with a lot of collaborators passing through, or do you think of it as more of a loose collective at this point?
Nowadays I mix and produce everything. I had to learn it by myself to have more knowledge in sound design and production. For me, it's very important to know the process behind certain feelings, and it's better when I have all that knowledge in the mix and production process. It gives me freedom to show new ideas. I rarely accept beats, but I'm very open to making more collaborations. I would love to only rap or sing and not worry so much about the production or mixing; it can be an interesting process, and it can give me surprises. And I also love to collaborate with different artists, mainly outside of my genre. That fusion can lead to very interesting songs and expressions.
